Nazi purges removed a third of Frankfurt’s university teachers

Evidence

In the initial revolutionary' period of the new regime, on average 14 per cent of academic staff and 11 per cent of professors were dismissed throughout the country. At the Ministry of Culture it was estimated that in the first five years after the seizure of power 45 per cent of all tenured academic posts had been reappointed. Frankfurt had the second largest number of university dismissals after Berlin. More than a third of all university teachers in Frankfurt lost their posts. The fact that a particularly nationalistic and conservative institution like the German university system was subjected to such an extensive purge can only be explained in terms of the hatred of Hitler and the Nazis for everything intellectual, for every academic activity not directly in the service of Nazi ideology and strategy. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 522</cite> (#corroborates`, via linked claim)

The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported on 14 April the first measures undertaken in Prussia to implement the Act of 7 April on the Reconstruction of the Professional Civil Service'. The Act was intended above all to provide for the dismissal of Jewish, Communist and Social Democratic civil servants. Among the victims of the first batch of suspensions’ (dismissal from state service and discontinuation of salary payments were to follow in the course of the year) were the Frankfurt professors Heller, Horkheimer, Löwe, Mannheim, Sinzheimer and Tillich. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 520 (#expands, via linked claim)

When Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock settled in Frankfurt with their wives and began to expand the German outpost', they saw themselves as Jews, as left-wing intellectuals and as critical sociologists in an environment which had been more or less completely purged of people like themselves, and in which all the signs had long since been pointing clearly to the restoration of the old order. The unique symbiosis represented by German-Jewish culture had been irreversibly destroyed. Apart from Horkheimer and Adorno, none of the distinguished lecturers or professors from the heyday of Frankfurt Universitythe last years of the Weimar Republicreturned. Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock could count on being met with patience and good intentions precisely because they were, and remained, the exceptions. — <cite>Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1845</cite> (#corroborates`, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Nazis purged over a third of Frankfurt university teachers, second only to Berlin — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 522; Postwar Frankfurt had been purged of left-wing Jewish intellectuals — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1845; The 1933 Civil Service Law purged Jewish and leftist academics from German universities — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 520 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Nazis purged over a third of Frankfurt university teachers, second only to Berlin #corroborates (1.00) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 522
• The 1933 Civil Service Law purged Jewish and leftist academics from German universities #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 520
• Postwar Frankfurt had been purged of left-wing Jewish intellectuals #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1845
• Nazi decrees stripped Jewish academics of teaching rights step by step #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 634